Relief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  Sharon quietly takes some moments to reflect. In suspending the compulsion for understanding, she experiences a sudden “burst of energy coming from deep inside my belly.” Does it have a color, I ask? “Yes, it’s red, bright red, like a fire.” Though visibly startled by its intensity, she does not recoil from its potency. Her experience shifts into (what she recognized as) a strong urge to run, concentrated in her legs and arms. However, with the very thought of running she again “freezes.” I sense that she is caught between the real and necessary desire to escape and her “unconscious” mind, which associates fleeing with being trapped. As on the stairwell, she had to restrain her powerful escape impulse and walk slowly—even though she was in mortal danger. This dilemma was compounded with the shock of finding the door locked on the seventieth floor. Then, when she eventually reached the mezzanine, the south tower collapsed and she was thrown violently into the air. Finally, there was the stark horror of finding herself lying semiconscious on a dead body. Two BrainsSharon was caught in a conflict between two very different centers in her brain: the raw, primitive self-preservation messages from the brain stem and limbic system were demanding that she run for her life, while her frontal cortex was sending messages of inhibition and restraint. It was telling her to be “reasonable” and walk calmly in an orderly line. In our session, it was crucial to separate the terrifying expectations of being trapped from her somatic biological impulses to act on and “metabolize” that survival energy. In order to uncouple the two, I ask if she can focus on the intense “electricity” she describes experiencing in her body and imagine taking it somewhere where she had previously enjoyed running. She stiffens in response to that invitation. She says, “It would make me feel too anxious.” I then surprise her by asking her where she feels the anxiety and what it feels like (see the Epilogue to this case). Disarmed, Sharon blurts out, “I don’t know. Oh, it’s my neck and shoulders and my chest feels like I can’t breathe … My legs are so tight that … I don’t know, they feel like they could …” “Like what?” I ask. “Like they want to run,” she responds. Then, with a little reassurance, she begins to feel the sensations of running along a path in her favorite park. After a few minutes, I observe a gentle trembling in her legs. I ask her what she is feeling, to which she responds, “I could really feel the running; it was full-out … and I don’t feel the anxiety anymore.” “OK, Sharon,” I interject, “but what do you feel?” “Well, actually I feel good, relieved … I feel tingly and relieved; and my breath feels really deep and easy; and my legs are warm and relaxed.” A tear gently streaks down her cheek. Her face and hands have an even pink color.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  We realized that we all felt somewhat out of step with American sexual attitudes, but putting a finger on what was culturally different wasn’t easy. On a subject as laden with taboos as the expression of sexuality, making generalizations is a slippery slope. But if I could hazard one unpolished observation, I would say that egalitarianism, directness, and pragmatism are entrenched in American culture and inevitably influence the way we think about and experience love and sex. Latin Americans’ and Europeans’ attitudes toward love, on the other hand, tend to reflect other cultural values, and are more likely to embody the dynamics of seduction, the focus on sensuality, and the idea of complementarity (i.e., being different but equal) rather than absolute sameness. Bedroom Politics Some of America’s best features—the belief in democracy, equality, consensus-building, compromise, fairness, and mutual tolerance—can, when carried too punctiliously into the bedroom, result in very boring sex. Sexual desire and good citizenship don’t play by the same rules. And while enlightened egalitarianism represents one of the greatest advances of modern society, it can exact a toll in the erotic realm. Elizabeth spent twenty years shepherding Vito from the machismo traditions of southern Italy to the postfeminist equality of suburban New York. When he says, “I think we’re partnering better,” in a voice that still sounds like Don Vito Corleone’s, I know just how much cultural transformation has taken place. Elizabeth is a woman in her mid-forties who describes herself as “hyperresponsible.” She’s a school psychologist who oversees the well-being of more than 400 elementary school children in addition to being in charge of most things in her own home. “I’ve always done the right thing. I’ve always been very task-oriented. I’ll make a list and keep it. In some ways it’s always worked. And I’ve always been in relationships where being the coordinator, competent and in control, was my designated job. There didn’t seem to be any time when I could just let myself go, feel free and giddy and maybe even a little irresponsible” Elizabeth pauses and smiles shyly. “Then I met Vito and discovered just how much I’m drawn to sexual submission. It may not fit the way I always thought of myself, or the way others thought of me, but it’s the truth.” “Because sex is a place where you can safely lose control?” I ask. “Yes.” “It is the one area where you don’t have to make any decisions, where you don’t have to feel responsible for anyone else.” “For me it’s like a vacation,” she explains. “I don’t have to wear makeup; I don’t have to answer the phone; I don’t have to be in charge. It’s like being on a wonderful, distant island, far away from my ordinary life. I can just step out of my world and be somebody else, sexy and a little wild.”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Oh, the relief as the seconds pounded by … and nothing happened. There was a scare as the door of a flat nearer the lift opened and a man in overalls came out without even looking in my direction. A scraping noise, a girl’s voice saying, ‘No, Wednesday,’ and the slam of a door, must have come from within another flat—it was hard to be sure. I turned on my heel, but being so far in I knew I must ring again to be sensible and certain. Perhaps Mr Hope, sleeping out his jobless afternoon, would be disturbed, and come vacantly to the door. A minute later I burnt off my adrenalin leaping down the stairs—which were bleakly concrete, like the long exit stairways at the back of cinemas. There was a smell of urine, and lines down the walls drawn by running hands. At the turn of each flight ‘NF’ had been scrawled, with a pendant saying ‘Kill All Niggers’ or ‘Wogs Out’. I thought with yearning of the Hopes, whom I did not know, forced to contain their anger, contempt and hurt in such a world. It would be best to see Arthur on common ground—in a bar or club or out in the open air which I now re-entered gratefully. In view of the horror of the case it had been rather reckless to go to his home, and I was glad I had got away with it. Ideally, I suppose, I wanted to help, to give money to the friend or consolation to the grieving mother: though I was always hoping, expecting even, to see him, there was an assumption dully gaining ground in my mind that he was dead. In the charmless passage between the buildings there were at least the skinheads to look forward to. I had once spent a weekend with a skinhead I picked up at a dance-hall in Camden Town; he called himself Dash, though that was not among the qualities of that ugly, passionate boy. I preferred to see it as a polite euphemism for one of the stronger words that were always hypnotically on his lips. They were a challenge, skinheads, and made me feel shifty as they stood about the streets and shopping precincts, magnetising the attention they aimed to repel. Cretinously simplified to booted feet, bum and bullet head, they had some, if not all, of the things one was looking for. I came by easily, and shot a glance at the big one I had noticed before. He was leaning against the wall, by the entrance to one of the rubbish bays, his ankles crossed, and looking straight at me. ‘Got the time,’ he said neutrally, hardly as a question. I virtually stopped, referred to my old gold watch. ‘It’s 4.15,’ I said.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Alastair just nodded back, saying nothing, staring entranced at Bill, breathing in keenly through his nostrils. When the bell rang, Bill popped the gumshield back into his mouth, swelling and spreading the pink lips into a fierce sneer. Then, as the referee bobbed backwards to the ropes, they were off again. The second round was unspectacular at first; the St Albans boy was by no means unattractive, I decided, if of a rather slow-witted, suspicious expression—and he managed to place a couple of good body-shots under Alastair’s guard, shots that were rare in this kind of fight. Then Alastair sent through a vicious jab to the black boy’s face, where we heard not only the muffled smack of the glove but beneath it a strange, squinching little sound, as of the yielding of soft, adolescent bone and gristle. As the boy fell back Alastair followed up, before anyone could stop him, with a second blow of punitive accuracy. Cutting the air between them with his arm, the referee held Alastair off, gestured him away, and as he did so caught up his left glove in his hand. Across its blancoed surface, smeared by the impact of the second blow, was the bright trace of blood. Bill turned to me with a look of relief. ‘He’s done it,’ he said. ‘They’ll have to stop it now. Yes, he’s done it.’ The shouts in the hall were modified with a sympathy easily accorded to the loser, and Alastair, himself looking rather stunned, cheated somehow by his own victory, jogged about in the ring, punching the air, which was all that was left for him, and showing he had hardly noticed, he needed a fight. After brief deliberations between the ref and the officious, serious judges (this was their life, after all) the unanimous decision was announced. Then Alastair relaxed, hugged and patted his opponent with a careless fondness, and did his lively round of thanks and handshakes. I was moved by the propriety of this. Bill of course went off with his champion, and after I’d watched the opening of the next fight, which didn’t promise to go so well for Limehouse, I wondered what the hell I was doing and sloped off too through the audience and out by the swinging blue doors. Through another door on the right I heard the familiar fizz of showers and felt the familiar need to see what was going on in them.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I instantly pictured James, as he had described himself, kneeling over corpses on long train journeys, as a doctor honour-bound to attempt to resuscitate them, long after hope was gone. I also fleetingly saw the Arab boy, wandering off under the budding trees, and thought that if I’d never succumbed to this fantasy, I wouldn’t be in this fix now. Still, I thought I knew what to do, partly from involuntary recall of life-saving classes by the swimming-pool at school, and I immediately knelt beside the old man, and punched him hard in the chest. The three other men stood by, undergoing an ashamed transition from loiterers to well-wishers in a few seconds. ‘He didn’t hang about, he knew the old bill’d do for him, soon as look at him,’ said one of them, in reference, apparently, to their companion who had fled. ‘Shouldn’t you loosen his collar?’ said another man, apologetic and well spoken. I tugged at the knot of the tie, and with some difficulty undid the stiff top button. ‘He mustn’t swallow his tongue,’ explained the same man, as I repeated my chest punchings. I turned to the head, and carefully lowered it, though it was heavy and slipped within its thin, silvery hair. ‘Check the mouth for obstructions,’ I heard the man say—and, as it were, echoing from the tiled walls, the voice of the instructor at school. I remembered how in these exercises we were only allowed to exhale alongside the supposed casualty’s head, rather than apply our lips to his, and the alternate relief and disappointment this occasioned, according to who one’s partner was. ‘I’ll go for an ambulance,’ said the man who had not yet spoken, but waited a while more before doing so. ‘Yeah, he’ll get an ambulance,’ the first man commented after he had left. He was well up on the other people’s behaviour. The patient had no false teeth and his tongue seemed to be in the right place. Stooping down, so that his inert shoulder pressed against my knee, I gripped his nose with two fingers and, inhaling deeply, sealed my lips over his. I saw with a turn of the head his chest swell, and as he expired the air his colour undoubtedly changed. I realised I had not checked in the first place that his heart had stopped beating, and had ignorantly acted on a hunch that had turned out to be correct. I breathed into his mouth again—a strange sensation, intimate and yet symbolic, tasting his lips in an impersonal and disinterested way. Then I massaged his chest, with deep, almost offensive pressure, one hand on top of the other; and already he had come back to life.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Wow, she really let fly. After I picked myself up off the floor, I realized that she was absolutely right. I’d no idea that I’d gotten from my folks the notion that a woman is fragile and that you have to tiptoe around or she would explode. I didn’t realize until that afternoon that my dad really had been very passive, always watching and waiting to see how my mom would fault him, or get a migraine, or go to her room depressed. Everything Sara said was right and it hit me like a ton of bricks. “But it was a body blow with a good ending,” he said. “Since then we’ve been dating once a week. Our sex life improved. We got rid of my parents’ ghosts who were coming between us. You might say that we both set each other free.” Sara of course had put her finger on exactly what Gary had come to expect in his family and was unconsciously reenacting—namely the notion that a woman is fragile and easily upset and a man’s job is to anticipate the storm by continued vigilance. As a result, Gary kept checking every move, to be sure not to upset her. This infuriated Sara because she was being treated like she was on the verge of exploding. Finally she did, and they came face-to-face with the hidden expectations of her that he had brought into the marriage. Each of us brings conscious and unconscious expectations, hopes, unfulfilled wishes, and fantasies from long ago into marriage. Each of us then comes up against the other person’s conscious and unconscious agenda as we evoke their hopes, fears, and fantasies. The secret of a good marriage is to arrive at a good enough fit so that each person feels that the relationship is uniquely satisfying, sometimes uniquely annoying, but probably irreplaceable. People who have been raised in good marriages have an easier time. They have clear models in their head and know the effort required. They’ve seen it work and don’t give up easily. Those who have been raised in an unhappy marriage that stayed together bring more guarded hopes and expectations. They may have a harder time deciding to marry. But they also have an extraordinary model of people who have been able to triumph over their anger at each other to protect their children. After a long journey, both Karen and Gary and many others like them were able to protect their marriages because they were willing to change. On balance, their stories are hopeful and encouraging. Being a Parent and the Legacy of Intact Families C HILDREN CARRY symbolic meaning for all parents.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  It was one of the most moving antiwar demonstrations there had been. I would have given anything to have been there with them. I read about it sitting by the pool of the Santa Monica Bay Club, wearing a ridiculous Mickey Mouse shirt. Suddenly I knew my easy life could never be enough for me. The war had not ended. It was time for me to join forces with other vets. I went home and called a couple of people I knew. One of them told me there was going to be a meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against the War that night in an apartment in L.A. I was still a bit unsure of myself but I couldn’t wait to get into my car and drive over. I remember how kind they were to me from the moment I arrived. When I got there, a bunch of vets were in front of the house waiting to carry me up the stairs in my chair. “Hi brother,” they said to me warmly. “Can we help you brother? Is there anything we can do?” All of a sudden everything seemed to change—the loneliness seemed to vanish. I was surrounded by friends. They were the new veterans, the new soldiers with floppy bush hats and jungle uniforms right here on the streets of America. I began to feel closer to them than I ever had to the people at the university and at the hospital and all the people who had welcomed me back to Massapequa. It had a lot to do with what we had all been through. We could talk and laugh once again. We could be honest about the war and ourselves. Before each meeting there was the thumb-and-fist handshake—it meant you cared about your brother. We were men who had gone to war. Each of us had his story to tell, his own nightmare. Each of us had been made cold by this thing. We wore ribbons and uniforms. We talked of death and atrocity to each other with unaccustomed gentleness. I remember being very nervous and anxious at that first meeting. I told them, Give me a speech, give me a place to show this wheelchair. I really wanted to get going immediately. The brothers told me to calm down and not to worry, there would be plenty of chances to speak, it was time to get the organization together. Afterward I went into the kitchen for a cup of coffee and one of the guys came up to me and gave me a big hug. He held me for a long time and when he let go there were tears streaming down his face. “I love you, brother,” he said, wiping his eyes. And then he said, “I’m sorry, I’m really sorry I did that.” “It’s okay,” I said. “I love you too. Now when’s my first speaking gig?” They told me to go to a rally in Pasadena the next day.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  The judge seemed surprised, too. He paused and then said he wanted the parties to submit written briefs arguing what ruling he should make. We had hoped for this, and I was relieved that the court would give us time to explain the significance of all the evidence in writing and assist him in preparing his order, an order I hoped would set Walter free. At the end of three days of intense litigation, the judge adjourned the proceedings in the late afternoon. Michael and I had been in a rush the final morning of the hearing and hadn’t checked out of our hotel before leaving for the courthouse. We said our farewells to the family in the courtroom and went back to the hotel, feeling exhausted but satisfied. — Bay Minette, where the hearing took place, is about thirty minutes from the beautiful beaches on the Gulf of Mexico. We had started a tradition of bringing our staff down to the beach each September, and we’d all fallen in love with the clear warm waters of the Gulf. The white sand and pleasantly underdeveloped beachfront were spectacular and soothing. The view was slightly spoiled by the massive offshore oil rigs you could see in the distance, but if you could make yourself forget about them, you’d think you were in paradise. Dolphins loved this part of the Gulf and could be spotted in the early mornings, playfully making their way through the water. I’d often thought we should move our office to right there on the beach. It was Michael’s idea to hit the beach before heading back to Montgomery. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but the day was warm and the coast was so close, I couldn’t resist. We jumped in the car, trailing the last hours of sunlight to the beautiful shores near Fort Morgan, Alabama. As soon as we got there, Michael changed from his suit to swim trunks and went sprinting into the ocean. I was too tired to race into the sea, so I put on some shorts and sat down at the water’s edge. It would soon be dusk, but the heat persisted. My head was full of everything that had transpired in court: I was replaying what witnesses had said and worrying about whether things had gone exactly right. I was trawling through every detail in my mind, every possible misstep, until I caught myself. It was over; there was no point in making myself crazy by overthinking it now.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  And Paris had done this for me: by leaving me com pletely alone. I lived in Paris for a long time without making a single French friend, and even longer before I saw the inside of a French home. This did not really upset me, either, for Henry James had been here before me and had had the gen erosity to clue me in. Furthermore, for a black boy who had grown up on Welfare and the chicken-shit goodwill of Anlcr ican liberals, this total indifference came as a great relief and, even, as a mark of respect. If I could make it, I could make it; so much the better. And if I couldn't, I couldn't-so much the worse. I didn't want any help, and the French certainly didn't give me any-they let me do it myself; and for that reason, even knowing what I know, and unromantic as I am, there will always be a kind of love story between myself and that odd, unpredictable collection of bourgeois chauvinists who call themselves la France. Or, in other words, my reasons for coming to France, and the comparative freedom of my lite in Paris, meant that my attitude toward France was very different fr om that of any Algerian. He, and his brothers, were, in fact, being murdered by my hosts. And Algeria, after all, is a part of Africa, and France, after all, is a part of Europe: that Europe which in vaded and raped the African continent and slaughtered those Africans whom they could not enslave-that Europe fr om which, in sober truth, Africa has yet to liberate herself The fact that I had never seen the Algerian casbah was of no more relevance before this unanswerable panorama than the fact that the Algerians had never seen Harlem. The Algerian and I were both, alike, victims of this history, and I was still a part of Africa, even though I had been carried out of it nearly four hundred years before. The question of my identity had never before been so cru cially allied with the reality-the doom-of the moral choice.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  He looked immediately familiar to me, like everyone I’d grown up with, friends from school, people I played sports or music with, someone I’d talk to on the street about the weather. The guard slowly unchained him, removing his handcuffs and the shackles around his ankles, and then locked eyes with me and told me I had one hour. The officer seemed to sense that both the prisoner and I were nervous and to take some pleasure in our discomfort, grinning at me before turning on his heel and leaving the room. The metal door banged loudly behind him and reverberated through the small space. The condemned man didn’t come any closer, and I didn’t know what else to do, so I walked over and offered him my hand. He shook it cautiously. We sat down and he spoke first. “I’m Henry,” he said. “I’m very sorry” were the first words I blurted out. Despite all my preparations and rehearsed remarks, I couldn’t stop myself from apologizing repeatedly. “I’m really sorry, I’m really sorry, uh, okay, I don’t really know, uh, I’m just a law student, I’m not a real lawyer….I’m so sorry I can’t tell you very much, but I don’t know very much.” The man looked at me worriedly. “Is everything all right with my case?” “Oh, yes, sir. The lawyers at SPDC sent me down to tell you that they don’t have a lawyer yet….I mean, we don’t have a lawyer for you yet, but you’re not at risk of execution anytime in the next year….We’re working on finding you a lawyer, a real lawyer, and we hope the lawyer will be down to see you in the next few months. I’m just a law student. I’m really happy to help, I mean, if there’s something I can do.” The man interrupted my chatter by quickly grabbing my hands. “I’m not going to have an execution date anytime in the next year?” “No, sir. They said it would be at least a year before you get an execution date.” Those words didn’t sound very comforting to me. But Henry just squeezed my hands tighter and tighter. “Thank you, man. I mean, really, thank you! This is great news.” His shoulders unhunched, and he looked at me with intense relief in his eyes. “You are the first person I’ve met in over two years after coming to death row who is not another death row prisoner or a death row guard. I’m so glad you’re here, and I’m so glad to get this news.” He exhaled loudly and seemed to relax. “I’ve been talking to my wife on the phone, but I haven’t wanted her to come and visit me or bring the kids because I was afraid they’d show up and I’d have an execution date. I just don’t want them here like that. Now I’m going to tell them they can come and visit. Thank you!”

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I might make an exception on this day because Mom was in the hospital, the result of a failed suicide attempt. For all the things I saw happening in the world around me, my eleven-year-old eyes missed so much. In her work at Middletown Hospital, Mom had met and fallen in love with a local fireman and begun a years-long affair. That morning Bob had confronted her about the affair and demanded a divorce. Mom had sped off in her brand-new minivan and intentionally crashed it into a telephone pole. That’s what she said, at least. Mamaw had her own theory: that Mom had tried to detract attention from her cheating and financial problems. As Mamaw said, “Who tries to kill themselves by crashing a fucking car? If she wanted to kill herself, I’ve got plenty of guns.” Lindsay and I largely bought Mamaw’s view of things, and we felt relief more than anything—that Mom hadn’t really hurt herself, and that Mom’s attempted suicide would be the end of our Preble County experiment. She spent only a couple days in the hospital. Within a month, we moved back to Middletown, one block closer to Mamaw than we’d been before, with one less man in tow. Despite the return to a familiar home, Mom’s behavior grew increasingly erratic. She was more roommate than parent, and of the three of us—Mom, Lindsay, and me—Mom was the roommate most prone to hard living.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  I laughed in relief. “How did she know I worked here?” “She saw you leaving the parking lot. She a friend of yours?” Bolt asked me. “Naw,” I distanced myself. “Just somebody I used to work with.” My own disloyalty sickened me. Bolt headed for the dock. “You coming to lunch?” I shook my head. “Tll be along, go ahead.” It was a telief to be alone. I wandered into the warehouse and sat down on a stack of skids to think about Bolt’s bombshell. Frankie was coming onto the day shift. It scared me to realize she might have exposed me. But apparently she didn’t. Frankie was sharp. She must have figured out the score right away. A feeling of excitement flooded me. Working with another butch! Maybe we could hang out sometimes. Maybe she knew where some of the old crowd was. Maybe she could introduce me to a femme. “Hey, young fella.” Scotty interrupted my thoughts. He was sitting on the floor, leaning up against the skids. Scotty unscrewed a bottle of Jack Daniels and offered it to me. “Thanks,” I said, taking a swig. Scotty tipped the bottle to his lips and swallowed three times. We sat in silence. “You married?” he asked me. I shook my head. He dropped his head to his chest. “My wife’s real sick.” He rubbed his eyes with his hands. His face brightened. “Did I ever show you a picture of my wifer” I shook my head. He pulled out a leather wallet, thin and smooth from wear. “Here she is. That’s my girl.” I laughed and whistled. ““That’s your” He smiled. “Yep. You think I was born this age? I was once a young fella just like you. Had my whole life ahead of me.” We both laughed. But when I looked at him again, his eyes were filled with tears. His voice sounded hoarse. “I wish I could go before she does. I know that sounds terrible. I mean, who would take cate of her, you know? But sometimes I don’t think I can stand letting go of her when the time comes.” His head dropped down again. I reached out and lay my hand gently on his back, ready to remove it quickly if my touch offended him. It didn’t. “You're young,” Scotty said, abruptly. “Don’t get stuck in a job like this.” I shrugged. “This job seems pretty good to me.” Stone Butch Blues 211 Scotty shook his head. “I mean a real job. I had twenty years in the Chevy plant. I got my UAW card, you want to see it? Twenty years of my life in a plant and they laid me off. Can you believe it?” “Chevy? Did you work with Bolt?” Scotty nodded. “Yeah. But he wasn’t there as long as I was. He worked at Harrison for a while. Got laid off there, too.” Bolt interested me. “Was he in the same union?”

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Even the fight that went too far—when I thought Bob was about to hit me—was less about a brave kid who intervened and more about a spectator who got a little too close to the action. This thing that I hated had become a sort of drug. One day I came home from school to see Mamaw’s car in the driveway. It was an ominous sign, as she never made unannounced visits to our Preble County home. She made an exception on this day because Mom was in the hospital, the result of a failed suicide attempt. For all the things I saw happening in the world around me, my eleven-year-old eyes missed so much. In her work at Middletown Hospital, Mom had met and fallen in love with a local fireman and begun a years-long affair. That morning Bob had confronted her about the affair and demanded a divorce. Mom had sped off in her brand-new minivan and intentionally crashed it into a telephone pole. That’s what she said, at least. Mamaw had her own theory: that Mom had tried to detract attention from her cheating and financial problems. As Mamaw said, “Who tries to kill themselves by crashing a fucking car? If she wanted to kill herself, I’ve got plenty of guns.” Lindsay and I largely bought Mamaw’s view of things, and we felt relief more than anything—that Mom hadn’t really hurt herself, and that Mom’s attempted suicide would be the end of our Preble County experiment. She spent only a couple days in the hospital. Within a month, we moved back to Middletown, one block closer to Mamaw than we’d been before, with one less man in tow. Despite the return to a familiar home, Mom’s behavior grew increasingly erratic. She was more roommate than parent, and of the three of us—Mom, Lindsay, and me—Mom was the roommate most prone to hard living. I’d go to bed only to wake up around midnight, when Lindsay got home from doing whatever teenagers do. I’d wake up again at two or three in the morning, when Mom got home. She had new friends, most of them younger and without kids. And she cycled through boyfriends, switching partners every few months. It was so bad that my best friend at the time commented on her “flavors of the month.” I’d grown accustomed to a certain amount of instability, but it was of a familiar type: There would be fighting or running away from fights; when things got rocky, Mom would explode on us or even slap or pinch us. I didn’t like it—who would?—but this new behavior was just strange. Though Mom had been many things, she hadn’t been a partier. When we moved back to Middletown, that changed. With partying came alcohol, and with alcohol came alcohol abuse and even more bizarre behavior.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Chapter 5 I had arrived without knowing how on the street where the Orst Museum was, and sat down, suddenly exhausted, on a bench opposite. The quiet out here was subtly different from the quiet of the middle of town, the little brick squares where for a full quarter of an hour no car would pass and nothing alter beyond the pulling-to of a shutter, or a dog trotting along with an intermittent sense of purpose. Here the stillness was as deep, the grand brick houses equally steeped in silence and discretion, their windows silver-black above the stumpy limes. But you felt a freshness, the nearness of a larger sky, to which the line of windmills at the street's end blindly opened their arms. I watched a couple of tourists arrive at the Museum and recognized their mood of achievement, of having come out quite far, almost into the country. In the Museum's dark, polish-scented hall I paid my admission fee, and bought a booklet, vainly feeling that the girl student at the desk should know that at other times I came here free, with the director, long after she had gone home. I laid a claim to it, somehow, because of the unexpected understanding I believed existed between Paul Echevin and me. It would have been pleasant if he had suddenly come down the stairs and spotted me; but I slightly dreaded it too, in case the greeting was cool and the girl student more in his confidence than I was. She sat behind the modest display of postcards with the defiant air of an intelligent person wasting time for a good cause. What hours, weeks, of nothing must happen in this hall, as the autumn came on. As I turned away she picked up a fat paperback and continued to read. The first room was long and half-panelled, with the sparse furnishing of a house no longer a home—a pair of roped-off chairs, a writing-desk with a dozen dusty pigeon-holes, a tall Dutch vase in the big black aperture of the fireplace. Cream cotton blinds were pulled half-down at the front, whilst at the far end the windows gave on to a sunless open porch and one of the city's high-walled secret gardens. A handful of paintings by Orst—each preciously isolated—hung in gentle diagonals of light against a background of worn heroic tapestry. I walked round the room three or four times wondering if it was all a mistake, if I should leave at once, but I clung to it in the end, almost fearing to be out on the streets again, the lulled, senescent streets, when I was so pierced with relief and exhilaration and lust and a sense of failure. I sat on an absent guard's folding stool as if stumbling to my corner, slugged by the boy's beauty and too stunned to see the beating still to come.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  pulled at her cunt. When I sensed she was finally about to come, I slid down and jabbed my tongue up into her slick hole as far as I could. She let out a guttural shriek and went off like a Roman candle. She was one of the women who insisted on giving me her phone number. The door opened, and someone came in and loosened my blindfold. I found myself looking up at Amira. “How’s the man of the hour?” she asked. “The gang wants to know how you’re holding up. Jennifer Chase wants me to tell you she’s going to have to reconsider her entire worldview because of this.” I smiled at her and sat up. “My face is sticky, my neck is stiff, and my tongue and jaw are exhausted. Other than that I’m great.” “I thought you might be working up a thirst,” she said, holding out a cup of beer. I took the cup gratefully and downed it in one long, deli cious gulp. “God, I needed that.” She chuckled, her teeth showing white against her dark skin. “Ready to get back to it?” “Actually, I think I’ve had enough.” “Aw, too bad. I guess I’m too late, then.” “I didn’t realize you were here as a customer,” I said, looking at her with new interest. Amira was one of those women who are all curves, and she looked too young to be in law school. Dark, arched eyebrows over liquid brown eyes, full red lips, a round face framed by thick wavy hair. Full breasts, round hips and thighs, but a surprisingly narrow waist. My cock, which had been up and down all night, began hardening again. She sat down next to me, and said, “Steve, I just wanted to say that you’ve got a lot of guts acting out your fantasy like this.” “You think so?”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  So, the last couple of days, I had been closer with the booze, and it was all the nicer to have him loosened up but not cantering out of control. We had never been better together. Even so, the relief of being in the water again was intense; when he had made a phone call in the morning and said he’d go away for a day something inside me asserted ‘That’s right.’ I lent him a shirt, perhaps I gave it to him—pink silk, it suited his blackness as much as it did my fairness—kissed him chastely, told him to come back when he wanted, and, when he had gone, went round opening windows (it was a coldish spring day). I put clean linen on the bed, and could hardly wait for night-time and getting in there for a good sleep all by myself. I kept stretching out my arms and legs, like one of those queeny Sons of the Morning in a Blake engraving. After a while I took this further, and slammed through a set of pull-ups, press-ups and sit-ups—and then ached for the pool. So self-enclosed had my life been for the preceding week—broken only by five-minute trips to the local shop for cereals, tins and papers—that I looked on the public crowding the Underground platform with the apprehension and surprise that people feel on leaving hospital.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Even the fight that went too far—when I thought Bob was about to hit me—was less about a brave kid who intervened and more about a spectator who got a little too close to the action. This thing that I hated had become a sort of drug. One day I came home from school to see Mamaw’s car in the driveway. It was an ominous sign, as she never made unannounced visits to our Preble County home. She made an exception on this day because Mom was in the hospital, the result of a failed suicide attempt. For all the things I saw happening in the world around me, my eleven-year-old eyes missed so much. In her work at Middletown Hospital, Mom had met and fallen in love with a local fireman and begun a years-long affair. That morning Bob had confronted her about the affair and demanded a divorce. Mom had sped off in her brand-new minivan and intentionally crashed it into a telephone pole. That’s what she said, at least. Mamaw had her own theory: that Mom had tried to detract attention from her cheating and financial problems. As Mamaw said, “Who tries to kill themselves by crashing a fucking car? If she wanted to kill herself, I’ve got plenty of guns.” Lindsay and I largely bought Mamaw’s view of things, and we felt relief more than anything—that Mom hadn’t really hurt herself, and that Mom’s attempted suicide would be the end of our Preble County experiment. She spent only a couple days in the hospital. Within a month, we moved back to Middletown, one block closer to Mamaw than we’d been before, with one less man in tow. Despite the return to a familiar home, Mom’s behavior grew increasingly erratic. She was more roommate than parent, and of the three of us—Mom, Lindsay, and me—Mom was the roommate most prone to hard living. I’d go to bed only to wake up around midnight, when Lindsay got home from doing whatever teenagers do. I’d wake up again at two or three in the morning, when Mom got home. She had new friends, most of them younger and without kids. And she cycled through boyfriends, switching partners every few months. It was so bad that my best friend at the time commented on her “flavors of the month.” I’d grown accustomed to a certain amount of instability, but it was of a familiar type: There would be fighting or running away from fights; when things got rocky, Mom would explode on us or even slap or pinch us. I didn’t like it—who would?—but this new behavior was just strange. Though Mom had been many things, she hadn’t been a partier. When we moved back to Middletown, that changed. With partying came alcohol, and with alcohol came alcohol abuse and even more bizarre behavior.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I rang people up and there were parties from six till eight—which meant going on, and then some drunken supper and then, as often as not, the Shaft and acts in which the influence of the orders, the dome, the portico, could scarcely be discerned. After I left Cubitts I felt hilarious relief at being no longer a cross between a professor and an office-boy—someone whose presence was explained as much by his name as by his interest in the arts. At the same time there was a slight sad missing of the slipshod office routine, the explanation over the first foul coffee of just where I’d taken whom, and what he was like in every particular. It was the sort of world that made you a character, and would happily, stodgily keep you one for life. And there was the subject too—the orders, the dome, the portico, the straight lines and the curved, which spoke to me, and meant more to me than they do to some. I slipped away from Arthur next day and walked in the Park—it was perhaps the straight lines of its avenues that exerted some calming attraction over me. As a child, on visits to Marden, my grandfather’s house, days had been marked by walks along the great beech ride which ran unswervingly for miles over hilly country and gave out at a ha-ha and a high empty field. Away to the left you could make out in winter the chicken-coops and outside privies of a village that had once been part of the estate. Then we turned round, and came home, my sister and I, spoilt by my grandparents, feeling decidedly noble and aloof. It was not until years later that I came to understand how recent and synthetic this nobility was—the house itself bought up cheap after the war, half ruined by use as an officers’ training school, and then as a military hospital. Today was one of those April days, still and overcast, that felt pregnant with some immense idea, and suggested, as I roamed across from one perspective to another, that this was merely a doldrums, and would last only until something else was ready to happen. Perhaps it was simply summer, and the certainty of warmth, the world all out of doors, drinking in the open air.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  While I really enjoyed the time we spent together, the pain of that adoption remained, and we spoke often of how and why it happened in the first place. For the first time, I heard his side of the story: that the adoption had nothing to do with a desire to avoid child support and that, far from simply “giving me away,” as Mom and Mamaw had said, Dad had hired multiple lawyers and done everything within reason to keep me. He worried that the custody war was destroying me. When I saw him during visitations before the adoption, I would hide under the bed for the first few hours, fearful that he would kidnap me and never let me see Mamaw again. Seeing his son in such a frightened state led him to reconsider his approach. Mamaw hated him, a fact I knew firsthand; but Dad said her hatred stemmed from the early days of his marriage to Mom, when he was far from a perfect husband. Sometimes when he came to pick me up, Mamaw would stand on the porch and stare at him, unblinking, clutching a hidden weapon. When he spoke to the court’s child psychiatrist, he learned that I had begun acting out at school and was showing signs of emotional problems. (This I know to be true. After a few weeks in kindergarten, I was held back for a year. Two decades later, I ran into the teacher who had endured my first foray into kindergarten. She told me that I’d behaved so badly that she had nearly quit the profession—three weeks into her first year of teaching. That she remembered me twenty years later says a lot about my misbehavior.) Eventually, Dad told me, he asked God for three signs that an adoption was in my best interest. Those signs apparently appeared, and I became the legal son of Bob, a man I’d known for barely a year. I don’t doubt the truth of this account, and though I empathize with the obvious difficulty of the decision, I have never felt comfortable with the idea of leaving your child’s fate to signs from God. Yet this was a minor blip, all things considered. Just knowing that he had cared about me erased a lot of childhood pain. On balance, I loved my dad and his church. I’m not sure if I liked the structure or if I just wanted to share in something that was important to him—both, I suppose—but I became a devoted convert. I devoured books about young-earth creationism, and joined online chat rooms to challenge scientists on the theory of evolution. I learned about millennialist prophecy and convinced myself that the world would end in 2007. I even threw away my Black Sabbath CDs. Dad’s church encouraged all of this because it doubted the wisdom of secular science and the morality of secular music. Despite the lack of a legal relationship, I began spending a lot of time with Dad.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  For nearly two years I’d been on the staff of the Cubitt Dictionary of Architecture, a grandiose project afflicted by delay and bad feeling. Its editor was a friend of my Oxford tutor, who was worried at my drifting unopposed into the routine of bars and clubs, saw me swamped with unwholesome leisure, and put in a word—one of those mere suggestions which, touching a nerve of guilt, take the force of a command. And so I had found myself turning up each day at St James’s Square and sitting in a little back office, disguising my hangover as a kind of wincing, aesthetic abstraction, and knocking box-folders of research material into shape. Volume One was to cover A to D, and I was allowed to work on some of the subjects that interested me most—the Adams, Lord Burlington, Colen Campbell. I edited the essays of repetitive pundits, was sent out to the British Library or Sir John Soane’s Museum to find plans and engravings; smaller subjects I was allowed to write up myself: I turned in an exemplary article on Coade Stone vases. But the Dictionary was a crackpot affair, a mismanaged business, an Escorial that turned into a Fonthill the longer we worked on it. I rang people up and there were parties from six till eight—which meant going on, and then some drunken supper and then, as often as not, the Shaft and acts in which the influence of the orders, the dome, the portico, could scarcely be discerned. After I left Cubitts I felt hilarious relief at being no longer a cross between a professor and an office-boy—someone whose presence was explained as much by his name as by his interest in the arts. At the same time there was a slight sad missing of the slipshod office routine, the explanation over the first foul coffee of just where I’d taken whom, and what he was like in every particular. It was the sort of world that made you a character, and would happily, stodgily keep you one for life. And there was the subject too—the orders, the dome, the portico, the straight lines and the curved, which spoke to me, and meant more to me than they do to some.